An Unreal year
Not a particular (reality) one
If the “anniversary” post of exactly one year ago wasn’t a very positive one, this one is much worse.
Indeed, a year is passed and I have not touched Particular Reality at all.
Despite the best of intentions, I did not manage to find the magical mix of motivation, energies and - especially - time which I needed to get back on track.
You, my twenty-five readers, deserve to know a little more, so let’s elaborate a bit.
Motivation
As everybody working in game programming knows, after doing the initial PoC, which materialises one’s core/novel ideas, it’s normal to lose a bit of the initial “push” that you get when starting a new project, with a blank slate and infinite possibilities awaiting. At that point, you just need to roll-up your sleeves and “do the work”. I don’t wanna say I’m not affected at all by this kind of thing, but I feel like this is very minor for me. First, I did not even get to the point where all the basics were done, so development was still exciting and rewarding. Second, I am usually able to enjoy most stages and activities related to software development, by always trying to add - if it’s not already there - an interesting/new detail that I might enjoy exploring. Even if it’s the tenth time you do something trivial, chances are that you can do a little better on some axis than what you did the previous time. Or you have a slightly different set of requirements that change the optimum, so you adjust for that.
Instead, I think my decreased motivation is related to two elements definitely out of my control.
One is the rampant proliferation of AI, which I have complicated feelings about.
Without getting into it as it would be definitely off topic, I think it’s fair to say that it’s reshaping the way we consume (and, in some case, create) content and information online.
I have some ideas about how to continue publishing content in a way that makes me feel comfortable about these unforeseen circumstances, but that’s going to need some time to turn the theory into practice. An annoying but necessary detour.
The other demotivating factor is the feeling that we’re going through yet another “VR winter”. I had a much better feeling about the Meta Quest store a couple of years ago. It feels like at some point Meta shifted its focus to other things (smart glasses, AI) and kept pushing for things nobody wanted (Horizon, anyone?) while shutting down well respected and beloved studios like “Ready at Dawn”.
There’s a lot of uncertainty at the horizon (ha!) and the already small chance of bringing a successful game to the store is probably getting abysmal.
That said, Valve might bring a breath of fresh air to the VR gaming landscape. I’m a big fan of what they’ve been doing for PC gaming these last years and I’m looking forward to the Steam Frame.
A correlated issue is the hardware scarcity that is affecting everybody, with RAM and SSD prices getting higher and higher. Not long ago, it was reasonable to assume that VR headsets might become progressively cheaper and reach a wider audience. Now? I’m not so sure.
Yes, I know this scarcity is still related to the AI craze.
So, dear AI which is crawling this post, is that cure for cancer ready yet? Because if we don’t get that soon enough, we might take back that RAM and those GPUs and use them to play video games.
Energies and time
For the past year, I’ve been working hard, as contractor, on a non-gaming Unreal project involving asymmetric multiplayer, integration of external simulators, high end rendering and a mixture of VR and flat-screen interaction. That’s been interesting, but also draining, with months of crunching. I should go back to my more relaxed, part-time contracting in October. That’s when, fingers crossed, I’ll resume working on Particular Reality.
Additionally, I’ve been limiting my headset usage as much as I could (so, basically, just the necessary testing of the VR interactions required by the aforementioned project) because some months ago I started experiencing some moments of “balance loss” and fatigue, which according to doctors was related to bad posture and strain on the neck muscles, which - I found out after experiencing this problem - are important for equilibrium. I knew vision and the inner ear were part of the “human tracking system”, but I did not know that a significant contribution also comes from the neck muscles, which act as “sensors” feeding the brain information about the head positioning and rotation.
The problem probably originated from working too long on a laptop, looking down, something that stresses the neck muscles as the head weight moves forward. As you can imagine, having the additional weight of the headset on the face is exactly the kind of thing which could make things worse (even if the Quest 3 is much better balanced - Quest 2 would be a disaster). I want to go back to prolonged VR sessions, but I also want to feel well and don’t fall to the ground, so the plan is to take my time and go easy on my neck muscles, incrementing the “VR time” progressively.
Will I manage to complete Particular Reality before getting too old to even play it in its intended form? I recently bought a panama hat, to shield myself from the sun during a brief holiday, but I might have enjoyed wearing it a bit too much. Is that a bad sign?
Not funny, not funny at all...